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There are a number of individual and contextual variables that influence public opinion of the police but we know little about the public opinion regarding state law enforcement agencies. Prior studies involving municipal police and other criminal justice agencies indicate that the perceptions of procedural justice, or fair treatment, are important predictors of citizen satisfaction with police services. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether individuals who perceive procedurally just treatment during their contact with a state patrol officer improve the levels of satisfaction with the state patrol.

This paper presents the results of a public opinion study (n=846) regarding the Colorado State Patrol conducted in 2009. A subsample of 393 individuals who had contact with the state patrol and were further surveyed about their contact with the officer. Logistic regression models were used to examine individual- and contextual-level variables influence satisfaction with the state patrol and whether this relationship was mediated by the perceptions of procedural justice.

The authors found that individuals who perceive higher levels of procedural justice expressed higher satisfaction with the state patrol. Females, older respondents, and non-white respondents expressed greater satisfaction, as well as those who had voluntary contact or were not arrested. More importantly, procedural justice mediated the effect of involuntary contact and arrest on levels of satisfaction, and while non-white respondents were less likely to experience procedural justice, when levels of procedural justice are controlled for, they have higher levels of satisfaction.

The findings emphasize the significance of citizen perceptions of procedural justice during contacts with members of the state patrol. The current study contributes to our knowledge of procedural justice and citizen satisfaction with police encounters given previous research on citizen satisfaction with police focuses almost exclusively on local-level agencies, and research on procedural justice asks the respondents almost exclusively about the police in general.

The COVID-19 pandemic placed many challenges on policing, from limiting officers' ability to interact with citizens to enforcing regulations to prevent the spread of the virus. One of those regulations, and the focus of the current study, is mask mandates.

Using a sample of over 550 US adults recruited on Amazon MTurk, the current study examines factors that may influence citizen attitudes toward the police's role in mask enforcement, with a specific focus on perceptions of the police, political leanings, and views about COVID-19 and mask-wearing.

The authors find that when respondents believed COVID-19 was serious and a major public health threat, they were more likely to believe the police should enforce masks, regardless of attitudes about the police, political party affiliation or other demographics.

The enforcement of public health mandates, such as mask wearing, often result in arguments related to the infringement of rights and questions about the overall legality of enforcement. This often puts law enforcement in a difficult position regarding how such mandates should be enforced and whether it is the responsibility of the police. Additional policy implications are discussed.

A strong body of research has established the concentration of crime in a small number of street segments or “hot spots” throughout urban cities, but the spatial distribution of mental health-related calls for services is less well known. The extent to which these calls are concentrated on a small number of street segments, similar to traditional crime calls for service is understudied. The purpose of this paper is to examine the concentration of mental health calls and the spatial distribution of street segments with mental health calls to provide directions for law enforcement and place-based policing.

Using call for service data from a large city on the East coast, the current study examines whether mental health calls for service are concentrated on street segments, and tests spatial dispersion to whether these “mental health hot spots” are spread throughout the city or clustered in space. Finally, the authors explore the relationship between mental health calls and violent and drug calls by calculating the correlation and using a spatial point pattern test to determine if mental health calls are spatially similar to violent and drug calls.

The authors found that mental health calls are concentrated on street segments; specifically 22.4 percent of calls are located on 0.5 percent of city street segments. Additionally, these street segments are fairly dispersed throughout the city. When comparing the spatial similarity of mental health calls to violent and drug calls, they are highly correlated suggesting a relationship between the calls types, but the location of mental health calls appears to be different from violet and drug calls.

Very few studies have examined the location of mental health calls and whether they are concentrated in small areas similar to crime, but such research can provide police officers new approaches to working with people with mental health problems. The police are the primary emergency response for calls involving someone with a mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis and the authors provide suggestions for policing that draw from strategies used in hot spot policing and mental health responses, like CIT, to address challenges of modern policing and working with people with mental health problems.

Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level arrangements are reflected in micro-level processes. This work uses radical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of “criminalized subjectivity” among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white university in the Midwest. I use semistructured interviews to explore the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction and how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. Findings demonstrate that Black university students are keenly aware of this particular stigma and its consequences in increasingly complex ways from the time they are school-aged children. They were aware of this stigma as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of themselves; said internalization was thwarted through strong self-concept and racial socialization. This increasingly complex awareness is also informed by an intersectional lens for some interviewees. I argue not only that the concept of stigma must be explicitly placed within these larger systems but also that understanding and identity-building are both rooted in ever-evolving processes of interaction and meaning-making. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and criminology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

The problems of One‐Man‐Bands (OMBs) began to be taken seriously in the early 1980s when the Aslib OMB group was formed. The group received considerable attention in the professional press, and became the object of a study by Judith Collins and Janet Shuter who identified them as “information professionals working in isolation”. Many of the problems identified in the Collins/Shuter study remain — not least of these being the further education and training needs of OMBs. These needs are studied in this report. The author has firstly done an extensive survey of the literature to find what has been written about this branch of the profession. Then by means of a questionnaire sent to the Aslib OMB group and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (INVOG), training and education needs have been pinpointed. Some of these needs have then been explored in greater detail by means of case studies. The author found that the most common deterrents to continuing education and training were time, cost, location, finding suitable courses to cover the large variety of skills needed and lastly, lack of encouragement from employers. The author has concluded by recommending areas where further research is needed, and suggesting some solutions to the problems discussed.

This review integrates and builds linkages among existing theoretical and empirical literature from across disciplines to further broaden our understanding of the relationship between inequality, imprisonment, and health for black men. The review examines the health impact of prisons through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology interact with prisons to potentially contribute to deleterious health effects and the exacerbation of race/ethnic health disparities.

This review finds that there are documented health disparities between inmates and non-inmates, but the casual mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well-understood. Prisons may interact with other societal systems – such as the family (microsystem), education, and healthcare systems (meso/exosystems), and systems of racial oppression (macrosystem) – to influence individual and population health.

The review also finds that research needs to move the discussion of the race effects in health and crime/justice disparities beyond the mere documentation of such differences toward a better understanding of their causes and effects at the level of individuals, communities, and other social ecologies.

There are racial differences in policing and treatment when people are stopped for the same crimes, and scholars have long documented and expressed concern regarding the police’s reactions to Black men. In this paper, we argue that racism is the root cause of police-involved killings of unarmed Black men. Utilizing several contemporary examples, we articulate the ways racism operates through cultural forces and institutional mechanisms to illustrate how this phenomenon lies at the intersection of public safety and public health. Thus, we begin by defining racism and describing how it is gendered to move the notion that the victims of police involved shootings overwhelmingly tend to be Black men from the margins of the explanation of the patterns to the center. Next, we discuss how the police have been used to promote public safety and public health throughout US history. We conclude by describing common explanations for contemporary police-involved shootings of unarmed Black males and why those arguments are flawed. Reframing the phenomena as gendered racism is critical for identifying points of intervention. Because neither intent nor purpose is a prerequisite of the ways that racism affects public safety and public health, the differential impact of policies and programs along racial lines is sufficient for racism to be a useful way to frame this pattern of outcomes. Incorporating gender into this framing of racism introduces that ways that Black men have been viewed, stereotyped, and treated implicitly in institutional practices and explicitly in institutional policies.

Here is the long‐awaited fourth edition of Ralph De Sola's classic Abbreviations Dictionary. This updated edition of a work first published in 1958 is the largest, most complete compilation of its kind — a reference book far surpassing all others in the field. Mr. De Sola has expanded his work to include more than 130,000 definitions and entries — over 77,000 definitions, over 54,000 entries. The current edition offers abbreviations, acronyms, anonyms, contradictions, initials and nicknames, short forms and slang shortcuts, and signs and symbols covering disciplines which range from the arts to the advanced sciences and embrace all areas of human knowledge and activity.

The following classified, descriptive list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” The prevailing policy of including all reference books received has temporarily allowed the listing of titles with imprints older than two years; with increased receipt of more current titles from a longer list of publishers, this policy will soon be discontinued (with the exception of older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). An additional copy of any title specifically requested by Mrs. Cheney should be sent to her for review. A decision to review titles appearing in the present column will then be made by Mrs. Cheney at her own discretion.